At Arrahatak, a re-creation of an Indian village at Henricus Historical Park,
Pete McKee shows his skill with bow and arrow.

An engraving in a 1626 German book depicts John Smith's imminent but
aborted execution in the left background.

The statue of Pocahontas at Jamestown. Her protection and plea to her father for mercy kept Smith's brains
from being dashed.

The
Virginia Company of London's Sir Thomas Dale shipped up the James River in the
summer of 1611 searching for a place to plant a new and improved version of
Jamestown—the flagging first permanent English settlement in America thirty
miles downstream. It would be called the Citie of Henrico or Henricus in honor
of Prince Henry, heir to the English throne and a great supporter of the
Virginia colony. The town would have a shorter life than its namesake—a dozen
years to the prince's eighteen—but its significance was greater than that suggests.

While Dale scouted for a suitable site,
laborers in Jamestown were ordered to start cutting "pales, posts and railes to
impaile his proposed new Towne." Instructions to Dale and to Governor Thomas
Gates from the Virginia Company, which owned and financed the Virginia
enterprise, made clear that Henricus would become the colony's new seat, and so
required a location that was healthier and easier to defend than Jamestown.

It was not the Indians who worried the
English, but the Spanish. Virginia colonists were intruding into what Spain
considered its own "Iberian lake," the Atlantic Ocean. The Spanish had claimed
ownership of much of the Americas since 1494, when Pope Alexander VI bestowed
it upon them. The world's only superpower, Spain could not be expected to
ignore such an affront by the upstart English. Spanish ships had explored the
Chesapeake Bay, which Spaniards called the Bay of Santa Maria, but their effort
to settle Jesuits to Christianize the Powhatan Indians in the late sixteenth
century had been disastrous for both sides. The Powhatans murdered the
missionaries; the missionaries and their shipmates introduced Old World
diseases that caused widespread death that weakened the tribe. The experience
with the Spanish prepared the Powhatans to deal more astutely with the English
arrivals in 1607.

If the English doubted how the Spanish might
react, they had only to recall Spain's brutal extermination of a small French
settlement in Florida, Fort Caroline, in 1565 and its slaughter of a band of
shipwrecked Huguenots a few days later. The war between England and Spain that
began in 1585 and saw the defeat of the Spanish Armada had concluded in 1604,
but the peace was uneasy. Spies and statesmen kept their monarchs scrupulously
informed about the goings-on in Virginia. The Spanish ambassador to England
repeatedly urged his king to wipe out the trespassers before they became
entrenched. Don Diego de Molina, a Spanish prisoner at Jamestown, smuggled out
a letter in 1613 imploring Phillip III, King of Spain and Portugal, "to stop
the progress of a hydra in its infancy" before it became a "gathering-place of
all the pirates of Europe."

Virginia's answer to the Spanish threat was
Henricus. Removing the colony's principal town farther upriver would make it
harder for Spanish warships to attack. The Virginia Company instructed Dale to
build Henricus some distance from deep water, beyond the range of enemy
ordnance, "where he can never march with horse" or drag cannon through the
forest. Whistling in the dark, the English put their faith in the fragility of
long supply lines, trusting that if attacked they could hold out until Spanish
soldiers became "wearied and starved."

Dale selected a peninsula that matched the
company directive. "I have surveyed a convenient strong, healthie and sweete
seate to plant a new Towne in," he wrote. London promoter Robert Johnson's 1612
pamphlet reported:

The Colonie is
removed up the river fourscore miles further beyond James towne to a place of
higher ground, strong and defencible by nature, a good aire, wholesome and
cleere (unlike the marish seate at James towne) with fresh and plentie of water
springs, much faire and open grounds freed from woods, and wood enough at hand.

Dale
took a ship to the Henricus site, but most of the three hundred men in his
command walked. The Indians harassed them along the way and after their
arrival. But Dale was the real bane of their existence. He drove his men
mercilessly. Accused of horrendous cruelties and heartily despised, he built
the town in record time. In ten days the settlers completed a vertical log
palisade securing seven acres of land, then built corner watchtowers, a church,
and storehouses. Only then, according to a history written by long-gone Captain
John Smith, did Dale "thinke upon convenient houses for himself and men."

Descriptions of Henricus conflict. De Molina
had ringing contempt for English construction, saying that a mere five hundred
Spaniards could easily destroy the colony because "the forts which they have
are of boards and so weak that a kick would break them down." He was prisoner
in one near Old Point Comfort near the mouth of the bay, built by 1609. Captain
Ralph Hamor, in a 1614 account repeated almost verbatim by later authors,
wrote:

There is in this
towne, 3 streets of well framed howses, a handsom Church, and the foundation of
a more stately one laid, of Brick, in length, an hundred foote, and fifty foot
wide, beside Store houses, watch houses, and such like: there are also, as
ornaments belonging to this Town, upon the verge of this River, five faire
Block houses.

The minister at Henricus, Alexander Whitaker,
wrote in a 1612 pamphlet promoting donations for the salvation of Indian souls
that the weather at Henricus was idyllic and assured readers in England that
there were not more than three sick people in the settlement: "Many have died
with us heretofore thorough their owne filthinesse and want of bodilie comforts
for sicke men; but now very few are sicke among us."

Being thus invited here, they pitch, the
spade men fell to digging, the brick men burnt their bricks, the company cut
down wood, the Carpenters fell to squaring out, the Sawyers to sawing, the
Souldier to fortifying, and every man to somewhat. And to answer the first
objection for holesome lodging, here they have built competent and decent
houses, the first storie all of bricks, that every man may have his lodging and
dwelling place apart by himselfe.

Most historians believe the upbeat tracts
were propaganda intended to persuade Englishmen to send more of their money and
their sons to the colony. Archaeologist Nick Luccketti, who has excavated the
area around Henricus, says, "The buildings they describe are far grander than
the sort built in Virginia in the 1610s and 1620s."

Across the river, Dale began additional
fortifications, creating a suburb of sorts. Here the colonists were reported to
have erected palisades and five tiny fortified dwellings across a narrow
peninsula. Inside the pale they constructed "a retreat, or guest house for sick
people," called Mount Malady, the first English hospital in America. Areas
inside the palisade were given optimistic names—Coxendale, and Hope in Faith, for
example—and nearby Whitaker built "a faire framed parsonage house" called Rock
Hall. It was to Rock Hall that young Pocahontas came after she was kidnapped by
the English, and where she lived while Whitaker instructed her in the Christian
faith and baptized her.

Christianizing Virginia's Indians was a
priority with the Virginia Company and King James. They planned to build a
college at Henricus to teach Indian children trades useful to the English, and
to train them as missionaries to their own people. One hundred English tenants
were sent to work ten thousand acres of college land to provide income for the
school's support, and more than A32,000 sterling was raised in churches
throughout England to get the institution off the ground.

But it was not to be. The Indians proved
"very loathe upon any tearmes to part with theire children," Governor George
Yeardley said, and the Powhatan uprising of 1622, in which about 350 English
died, sent colonists looking for revenge instead of converts. When the College
of William and Mary was established seven decades later, it did include an
Indian school, the Brafferton, but it was built in Williamsburg, not Henricus.

The Citie of Henricus, like its predecessor,
Jamestown, did not thrive. The seat of government did not move upriver. In 1616
Henricus's population stood at about sixty. During their 1622 uprising, the
Powhatans burned part of the town—or perhaps all of it—and killed an unknown
number of colonists. One year later, a visitor, Captain Nathaniel Butler,
reported that he

found the Antient Plantations of Henrico and
Charles Citty wholly quitted and lefte to the spoile of the Indians, who not
onely burned the houses saide to be once the best of all others, but fell upon
the Poultry, Hoggs, Cowes, Goates and Horses whereof they killed great numbers
to the greate griefe as well as ruine of the Olde Inhabitants.

But
local planters said Henricus lingered and that seven large guns were still
there in 1624.

Remnants of the town and a great ditch Dale
had dug along the palisade were visible more than a century later. William
Stith, rector of Henrico parish and one of the governors of the College of
William and Mary, wrote in 1747 that "the ruins of this Town are still plainly
traced and distinguished, upon the Land of the late Col. William Randolph, of
Tuckahoe." As late as the Civil War, a historian wrote that Dale's breastworks
"and vestiges of the town are indicated by scattered bricks showing the
positions of the houses."

As
it turned out, the Spanish never attacked. The Powhatans did. Why didn't the
Spanish act? A small fleet could have wiped out the pathetic English colony
easily during its early years, and advisors to Phillip III recommended just
that. The king agreed to the plan they proposed. But the "all devouring
Spaniard" so feared by Jamestown's leaders never laid his ravenous hands upon
Virginia.

Both kings wanted to maintain the fragile
peace between their countries. Long years of war and piracy had depleted their
treasuries. The Spanish military had to concentrate on suppressing a Dutch
rebellion. The peace treaty with England guaranteed that the English would stop
helping Dutch Protestants in their fight for independence, and that they would
stop privateers from preying on Spanish vessels. Besides, reasoned Phillip, the
Jamestown colony was unlikely to survive—reports from his spies about
starvation, disease, and Indian troubles must have had him chuckling—and
Virginia had no gold or silver. Why not sit back and enjoy watching James I get
sucked into the Virginia money pit? If the price of English pacification was
one miserable colony in Virginia, Phillip was prepared to pay.

Like Wolstenholme Towne, seven miles below
Jamestown, and other settlements destroyed by the Indians in 1622, Henricus
would not be rebuilt. There was scant need for towns in the early plantation
economy, so in a sense, Henricus was a victim of Virginia economic success. As
self-contained tobacco plantations prospered, the larger ones became miniature villages
themselves with storehouses, docks, essential trades, and sometimes a church.
The only reason for a town to exist was the business of government, and one was
enough. Jamestown, and later Williamsburg, was the colonial capital, the place
where the governor resided, the courts convened, and the legislature met.

The exact site of Henricus is lost. The
general area has been disrupted during the past three centuries, from the Civil
War, when Union forces cut a canal to straighten out the river, to more recent
gravel mining and the construction of a Dominion Virginia Power electric power
station. Three serious archaeological attempts since the 1970s have turned up a
few nails and some lead shot but no other evidence of the settlement.

The town, however, is represented by Henricus
Historical Park, peopled by costumed interpreters in reconstructed buildings.
By the fall of 2005 three more reconstructions are to join Arrahatak, a
representation of an Indian village, the fortified Citie, and the John Rolfe
Farm. These include Mount Malady, a tavern, and Rock Hall, the home of Rev.
Whitaker and, for a time, Pocahontas. Henricus is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

More than eight hundred acres surrounding the
historical site form the Dutch Gap Conservation Area, home to blue herons,
eagles, and other rare birds. The Audubon Society lists Henricus-Dutch Gap as
one of the top sites for birding in Virginia. Trails are open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Archaeologist Luccketti speculates that the
town was slightly behind the reconstruction of the village, on what was once a
broad, high clearing a short distance from the river. If so, it was destroyed
by gravel mining. Today the Dutch Gap Conservation Area and a Dominion Virginia
Power plant co-exist where once stood the Citie of Henricus.